Page 4 • April 12 - April 18, 2010 • Insight News
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EDUCATION New policy boosts students in need, HBCUs Special to the NNPA from the Afro American Newspapers WASHINGTON (NNPA) - With the signing of yet another historical piece of legislation, President Obama made good on his promise to make higher education more affordable and accessible for all Americans. The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, enacted on March 30, strengthens the Pell Grant program, invests in community colleges, extends support for historically Black colleges and other minorityserving institutions, and helps student borrowers manage their student loan debt by capping repayments at 10 percent of their discretionary income. These efforts will be fully paid for by ending the government subsidies currently given to banks and other
Schools From 3 considered one of the greatest victories of the Civil Rights Movement-the desegregation of our nation's schools-is unraveling before our eyes.
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financial institutions that make guaranteed federal student loans. “By removing the bank’s middle men and eliminating millions of dollars in annual subsidies we are able to ensure that students have a more competitive and robust program for entering colleges and leaving them and going on to jobs not burdened so heavily by additional loans,” said Melody Barnes, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. In addition to increasing affordability, this legislation comes at a crucial time for HBCUs and predominantly Black institutions (PBIs), which will receive $850 and $150 million, respectively. The institutions typically bear the brunt of economic despair more than other colleges and universities. Doing more with less, HBCUs and PBIs are enrolling higher proportions of low- and middle-income students. These much-needed dollars Desegregated schools grew in the years directly following the Civil Rights Movement, but since 1988, racial resegregation in public schools has been rising slowly and systematically. In June 2007, both the spirit and intent of the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision were assaulted when the Supreme Court acknowledged in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education the benefits of racially diverse schools for all students who attend them, but ruled that desegregation plans that assign students to schools on the basis of race are unconstitutional. At a time when the number of poor and minority children in America is growing and the number of White middle-class children is decreasing, our schools are once again becoming
and graduate. • Invest $2 billion in a competitive grant program for community colleges to develop and improve educational or career training programs. • Save taxpayers $61 billion over 10 year by allowing students to borrow directly from the government through the Direct Loan program, thus avoiding excessive bank fees.
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can be used to renew, reform, and expand programming to ensure that students at these institutions are given every chance to live up to their full potential. Several provisions in the bill, which Black lawmakers fought to include, will:
• Invest $35 billion over 10 years to increase the maximum annual Pell Grant to $5,550 in 2010 and to $5,975 by 2017.
isolated by race and class. Plans like the diversity policy and magnet school program that have been in place in Wake County, which focused primarily on socioeconomic status instead of race, helped produce integrated schools with broad appeal and academic achievement gains; this twopronged approach was lauded as another method of achieving diversity without concentrating children in racially isolated, high-poverty schools. But as the recent school board decision there shows, even those successful measures are now under attack. The problem, as leading expert Gary Orfield of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles and others have argued, is that segregated schools are not good for any of our children. We already know they are disastrous for poor and minority students,
for whom there is a strong connection between school segregation, failing schools, and high dropout rates. Almost half of America's Black students and nearly two-fifths of Latino students attend high schools that have been labeled "dropout factories" by Johns Hopkins University researchers and the U.S. Department of Education, where less than 60 percent of the freshman class will graduate in four years. But studies of the outcomes of inter-district transfer programs also show that while programs designed to improve integration significantly improve the life chances of children who are transferred in, they do not have a negative effect on the academic progress of students in the receiving district-one of the apparent fears of many parents. In fact, as Orfield and others note, integration has been shown to benefit children on both sides.
• Invest $2.55 billion in HBCUs and minority-serving Institutions to provide students with the support they need to stay in school
These benefits build on other provisions of the law that put the Pell Grant program on sounder footing by covering past and expected shortfalls and that invest new dollars in community colleges. “The success of these institutions is not only vital to the success of African Americans, but it is also vital to the success of all Americans,” said John S. Wilson, executive director of the White As our society becomes more and more diverse, it is critically important that children from all backgrounds learn to interact with one another productively. When parents are allowed to hold on to the outdated beliefs that sending their children to a "diverse" school means sending them to an inferior school, it does their own children a disservice. In a rapidly globalizing world, returning to segregated schools would be another missed opportunity for all of America's children. We have so far left to
House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, in a teleconference this week. Strengthening HBCUs and PBIs, said Wilson, pushes the U.S. Department of Education closer to their goal set by President Obama last February, that “by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” He adds, “That is the goal that guides structure and context for all we’re doing.” Starting July 1, all new federal student loans will be direct loans delivered and collected by private companies under performancebased contracts with the Department of Education. According to the Congressional Budget Office, ending these wasteful subsidies frees up nearly $68 billion which this new law reinvests back into students and into deficit reduction over the next 11 years.
go. We can't afford to take any more steps backwards. Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.